Iwant to buy an external dvd burner to attach to my laptop which only has USB 1 ports. The burner says it uses USB 2 or fire wire. Will it work,albeit slower, with my computer. And if so, just how much slower will it be. Since the slowest part of the whole process is what limits speed, will this be the rate limiting factor?
Depends on how the DVD drive is designed. The DVD drive has a buffer in it, which it uses to store data before it gets written to the DVD or CD. If the buffer ever gets empty while it is writing, it’s called a buffer underrun, and basically it means that it’s time for the data to be written to the disk but the data isn’t there. The end result is you just made yourself another coaster.
The way you avoid buffer underrun errors is:
- Make sure the computer is fast enough to keep feeding it data
- Make sure that there’s nothing else running in the computer so it’s not going to be busy doing something else when it needs to be sending data to the drive
- Make sure that the interface to the drive is fast enough that it doesn’t become a bottleneck (this is where USB 1 vs USB 2 comes into play since 2 is faster).
- Put a bigger buffer in the DVD drive (this is done by the guys who designed the drive, it’s not something you can change).
If you set the write speed slower, you don’t need for everything to be as fast. It might work, it might not. I would say most likely it will work as long as you keep the write speed down, but I wouldn’t guarantee it.
Reading a DVD or CD will be fine, just slow.
Thanks, that’s great information. I will probably invest in a USB2 card for the notebook then. They are cheap enough.